And now finally: a topic for Margherita Horowitz, the great Austrian actress who played supporting roles (many uncredited) in countless Italian films!

Margherita was born in Austria in 1919. Her birth name was Margarethe Horowitz and her mother was Jewish. She started her career as an actress very early, and was only 14 years old when she was discovered and started to play small theater roles in Vienna.

But the growing anti-semitism in Europe in the late 1930s put an end to Margarethe's career, and she couldn't get any more work because she was half-Jewish. Desperate for work, the now 18-year-old Margarethe heard about opportunities for young singers and dancers in Italy, and decided to go to an audition. The tall, blonde and attractive Margarethe impressed on her audition and was given a six-month contract to work on the stage at the Teatro Valle in Rome.

In Rome, she met Renato Trentini, a handsome Italian fascist officer, and the two fell in love with each other. Margarethe and Renato quickly got married, and Margarethe now changed her name to Margherita Trentini and converted to Roman Catholocism. But the happiness was short-lived because soon World War 2 broke out. Renato started to work as a liaison with the German army. Because of the German occupation of Italy, there was desperate need for translators and a German major offered Margherita a translator job. Terrified that the Nazis would discover that she was half-Jewish, Margherita was too afraid to say no, and she worked with organizing theater performances for the Nazis and translaing their documents and conversations.

Fortunately, the Germans never discovered the truth about Margherita's Jewish heritage and when the war ended in 1945 she could finally feel safe. She divorced Renato, took back her maiden name Horowitz and started to act in the theater again. She also worked as a model, and also started to appear in small movie roles. Her earliest movie credit on the IMDb is from 1960 but we must assume that she also played many uncredited roles in the 1950s. Indeed, many of her roles were small and uncredited but in the 1960s she started to also get more substantial supporting roles, and was a prolific character actress up until the 1980s. In 1989, Margherita retired from acting and since then she has lived quietly outside the limelight but in 2003 she was interviewed in the Associated Press about her experiences during the war, and it was thanks to this interview that I was able to create this mini-bio for her.

And let's not forget her very memorable role as the hostage in Uomini si nasce, poliziotti si muore (1976). I was very impressed with her work in this film as she really gets roughed up by Franco Citti

Not surprisingly, Margherita has also appeared in a fotoromanzo. Here she is (uncredited) as Rosanna Galli's mother in "Nel profondo del cuore", a fotoromanzo-a-puntate published in the magazine Sogno from September 1962 to early 1963: